What is an "empire"?

​Is the domain presided over by Alexander the Great quite the same thing as the British empire of millennia later? The empires of the great Khans seem a rather different phenomenon than the law-bound Roman empire, do they not? The Dutch empire was, for the first part of its history, run by a private company. Do maritime empires follow the same set of rules as landed empire? What, really, are we talking about when we talk about empire? And what does the United States have in common with any of this? We don’t intend to settle the matter with one blog post, but we have to start somewhere. And if we are contending, as we are, that the United States is in fact an empire, perhaps it will do for the moment to make a preliminary sketch.

The ​ famed aphorism, “Imperialism is not a word for scholars” (with minor revisions, variously attributed) sows the confusion it purports to recognize. Certainly empires are complicated things, subject to contingency, frailty, luck, and failure. Some have colonies, others do not. Some are authoritarian, some appear to be democratic. Some seem to foreground militarism while others go out of their way to highlight their benignity. Some appear to be backward looking while others seem to cast their gaze firmly on the future. Still, complex as they are, it is possible to know things about empires, and Professor Sir Hancock or Lord Hailey will have to take a seat, at least for one post, as we have a few words on the matter. But perhaps one concession to intellectual complexity can be made, and we might consider that rather than what empires are, with all the historic ambiguity with which we must wrestle to understand empires-in-being, we might consider what empires do as the more or less stable category by which to understand them over time. Empires take many forms, but they pursue rather fewer activities.
 
So let us start with this: “Empires,” the scholar Michael Doyle writes, “are relationships of political control imposed by some political societies [states, dynasties, patrimonies, etc.], over the effective sovereignty of other political societies.” Doyle notes that such dominion need not necessarily mean territorial control and that there are other forms of political inequality that fall outside the scope of empire. Doyle’s succinct definition of empire--as unambiguous political domination--is as good a place to start as any.
 
To Doyle’s definition we might add two recent amplifications. The scholar Alejandro Colás sets out three defining fundamentals of empire: expansion, hierarchy, and order. Here, clearly, we are in the territory not of what empires are but what they do. Colás’s short and punchy book is worth reading in full, but a gloss of his ideas will get us started. Expansion is clear enough: empires are inherently expansionist and will in general seek to absorb surrounding peoples and regions. A host of political, social, cultural, and ideological imperatives flow from this observation, and what we mean both by “absorb” and "surrounding" will have to wait for later elaborations. But for now it seems not at all controversial to note the obvious geographical expansive nature of empires, from Rome or the Mongols, to early modern Spain, and modern Dutch, French, and British examples, to name a few. Expansion includes contiguous territorial as well as non-contiguous maritime expansion and absorption. Expansion also occurs in the cultural, economic and financial, perhaps psychological, and even astronomical domains. Empires may not be constantly expanding, they may contract, and expansion is not without domestic political contestation. But the essential expansiveness of empires as distinct from the apparent territorial contentedness of nation-states should be clear enough.
               
Expansion, to jump ahead on Colás’s list, brings in an essential imperial paradox, since all empires also seek to produce order. Order means secure trade routes, domestic quiescence, and international security vouchsafed as a prerequisite and promise of imperial citizenship. Expansion, of course, is very often disordered, even usually violent. And as we briefly noted, expansion may produce domestic political disturbances, especially in the later democratic empires. So the expansion imperative places in some difficulty the order imperative. Reconciling these competing functions is the job of imperial ideology, and indeed, one of the primary reasons why empires are so profoundly redolent of ideology: in effect, empires need ideology more than other polities because they have more internal contradictions to reconcile. Moreover, while he rightfully stresses the order-producing quality of empires, Colás seems to significantly underplay the imperial urge to revise, that is, to alter the international status quo. The relationship between imperial order and imperial revision will provide fodder for much discussion down the road. As we are here merely sketching some useful concepts that we will unpack and interrogate later, we’ll conclude this observation.
 
Finally, in Colás’s list of imperial identifiers: hierarchy. Empires produce hierarchy, both at home and abroad. In the first instance, all empires of which we are familiar produce a distinct set of social castes. A favored imperial elite enjoys top privileges, down through the lesser castes, to a final group of workers, helots, and/or slaves. It is in and through this strict social caste that imperial benefits are channeled and imperial service obligations and citizenship rights defined. At the same time, the empire also (re)produces hierarchy abroad through conquest and subjugation, establishing on the one hand, formal classes of imperial citizenship posed against barbarians and savages, and on the other a strict hierarchy of client and vassal states or polities in thrall, or subject to, imperial power.  
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Expansion, hierarchy, and order help to define imperial purpose and as such to help us distinguish empires from other forms of state organization. A second elaboration of what an empire does versus what it is: the historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper argue persuasively that all empires, by definition, manage difference. That is, as empires expand and incorporate people who differ in ethnicity, religion, culture, and political systems, the empire finds it necessary to incorporate those differences in relation to the empire’s pre-existing political and ideological systems. Novel forms of social organization, political control, interest group bargaining, and, crucially, ideological refinement are necessary to manage difference, and these must be correlated to, fixed into, or modified in the face of the empire’s ongoing systems of rule, of subordination, and of ideological coherence. The management of difference contrasts with putatively homogenous nation-states. Obviously some empires are better at managing difference than others, and thus some empires are more stable than others. A severe case of difference mismanagement is the Third Reich, whose brutal approach to managing difference is the example par excellence of an unsatisfactory arrangement in this regard.
 
Curiously, neither Colás nor Burbank and Cooper stress (perhaps they take for granted) what is undoubtedly the most important activity of empire: profit-seeking. An empire, in a metaphor that scholars can understand, is a kind of active balance sheet, a mechanism for funneling resources of all varieties into the imperial center, the metropole, and in particular, to a favored class of imperial citizens. Empires channel and distribute wealth (whether in the form of money, goods, resources, or labor) from one people or polity to another. This definition also has the virtue of emphasizing the nearly-always multi-racial and multi-ethnic character of empires, bringing Colás’s pursuit of hierarchy and Burbank/Cooper’s management of difference into alignment. If a nation-state is a state defined by a particular ethnicity, then an empire is a state that by definition encapsulates (and also likely subordinates) one or more (ethnic) groups to a dominant (ethnic) group in pursuit of a positive balance sheet.
 
Other authors have attended to the necessary ideological function of empires, and we will also consider factors such as the “will to power” and the consistent “civilizing” missions undertaken by nearly all empires. Empires produce and promulgate ideology and without a firm understanding of what these are, and the political and economic work they do, our understanding of empire is incomplete. Roman ideology is the prototype but given the modern development of democracy and liberal capitalism, the imperial ideologies developed by Great Britain and, later, the United States, are rich, nuanced, complicated, and subtle. Much of this blog will be devoted to uncovering what modern imperial ideology looks like, the work that it does, and how that ideology is circulated in the political and popular cultures of the United States. It is also true that empires are seldom, or at least not always, teleological. Empires often posit themselves the heirs and actors of history itself, but in point of fact most imperial policy is ad hoc, improvisational, undesigned, perhaps even taken “in a fit of absence of mind.”
 
There may not be a teleology to empire, but this blog is committed to the idea that there is nevertheless a logic to empire. There are structures, historical tendencies, and parallels enough that make the concept now a word for historians.
 
Political control, profit and resource extraction, expansion, order, hierarchy, mission and ideological influence: these seem to be the markers of empire. What have I left out? Do you recognize the United States in any of these? Leave your comments below!
 
Further reading:
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010)
Alejandro Colás, Empire (Polity, 2007)
Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Cornell, 1986)